5 July 2008

The article provides a look into some arguments used in lousy 19th and early 20th century science papers produced with the goal to produce evidence to support racial segregation.

“Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain is the title of a long and technical paper by the anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906. It is one of a series of scientific papers written by Bean in the early 20th Century, in which he tried to provide scientific evidence of the inferiority of black people. … between the years of 1905-1907,[Bean] was an instructor in anatomy at the University of Michigan. It is during this period of his life that Bean began his investigations into “the Negro brain”.”